Description
Book SynopsisDavid McDermott Hughes investigates why climate change is not yet a moral issue by examining the history of energy use in Trinidad and Tobago. Drawing parallels between Trinidad's history of slavery and its oil industry, Hughes shows how treating oil as "ordinary" prevents us from making the moral choice to abandon it.
Trade Review“Hughes has contributed greatly to an understanding of how climate change is viewed in locations outside of the modern Western world.” -- Sandra Moore * Anthropology Book Forum *
"
Energy without Conscience is a thoughtful take on how climate change complicity can exist without a countrywide collective conscience of wrongdoing." -- Trey Murphy * Geographical Review *
"Hughes offers us a rich and important ethnographic account of Trinidad that marks the Caribbean nation not only as the site of Christopher Columbus’ third exploration to the Americas, but also as the world’s first petro- extractive geography. . . .
Energy Without Conscience is a powerful and urgent book, one that furthers an understanding of global interconnectedness, not as a neoliberal project of unity, but through a web of danger, unequal outcomes, and a matrix of complicity." -- Macarena Gomez-Barris * Journal of Latin American Geography *
“Overall, Hughes’s
Energy Without Conscience gives us a deeply historicized description of Trinidad and Tobago’s oil economy. Most importantly, he describes the potentiality of the past to have led to different presents and inspires us to consider different futures…. [The book] raises important questions about the ethical considerations and responsibilities of doing research in a world facing climate catastrophe. Owing to the methodical issues it covers, it will be of particular interest to anyone planning and conducting research in the broad fields of energy humanities, the anthropology of climate change, and extractive industries.” -- Kari Dahlgren * Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
Part I. Energy
with Conscience
1. Plantation Slaves, the First Fuel 29
2. How Oil Missed Its Utopian Moment 41
Part II. Ordinary Oil
3. The Myth of Inevitability 65
4. Lakeside, or the Petro-pastoral Sensibility 95
5. Climate Change and the Victim Slot 120
Conclusion 141
Notes 153
References 165
Index 183
